Chapter III: The Critic in the Bud

ONE of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the nooks of old England and 'ould Ireland'; I have a propensity for 'dawdling and dandering' among them whenever the occasion arises, and I am yielding to it here.

Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of brochures upon the surrounding villages. One of these, called 'St. Ives and the Printing Press,' has greatly interested me, for it reveals the wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural districts lies ready for the picking up. I am tempted to quote from this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell's time the temper which produced Cromwell has remained. During the time when at Cambridge George Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen's, revolted against the discipline and the doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed. The house whence issued these fulminations was the 'Old House' in Crown Street, now pulled down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton's father, having remained during all this time a printing office. Mr. Norris gives a very picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the house, with its pointed roof, 'king posts' and panelling, reminding one of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices. Mr. Norris also tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the 'Crown Inn,' that William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens. According to Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton's father when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor. A curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to Lamb, and inspired some of Elia's most delightful touches of humour. This poem of Dyer's opens thus:--

Though much I love th' AEolian lyre,
Whose varying sounds beguil'd my youthful day,
And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
In fabled groves, among th' Aonian choir:
Yet more on native fields, thro' milder skies,
Nature's mysterious harmonies delight:
There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
What is the moon's pale orb that cheer'd the lonesome night?
I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
No purple Venus round my Hammond's bow'r,
No blue-ey'd graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
The king of gods here rains no golden show'r,
Nor have these lips e'er sipt Castilian dews.

At the 'Old House' in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer's time, if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general. Filled with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that boyish utterance. It interests me much, because I seem to see in it adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I hope to enrich these pages. I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking advantage of a lucky accident--the accident that a member of Mr. Watts-Dunton's family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported. In 1854, 'W. Theodore Watts,' as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be himself a member--if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just left it--on account of his father's great local reputation as a man of learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the toast, 'Science.' In the 'Cambridge Chronicle' of that date the proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely improvized. The subject which he discussed was 'The Influence of Science upon Modern Civilization':--

"It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical
lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs
straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches. Now, of
all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most
hopeful one for humanity is physical science--that branch of the tree
which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to
bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present
wondrous state of development. I am aware that the assertion that
Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by
many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person
young and inexperienced as myself. It is heterodox; it clashes, for
instance, with the venerable superstition of 'the wisdom of the
ancients'--a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my
friend Mr. Wright's old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been
talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the
point:--

For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men lere.

But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom
in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply
abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients
more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy. It is
the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong
only to individuals. There can be no doubt that, of contemporary
individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and
is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with
generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact. As
Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, 'Those who came
first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least
experience. Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in
arms--chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under
Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the
white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are
prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can
supply.

And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own
English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity. What, for instance,
was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans--what but the
wildest Astrology? What schoolboy has not chuckled over the
ingenious old Herodotus's description of the sun being blown out of
the heavens? Or again, at old Plutarch's veracious story of the
hedgehogs and the grapes? Nay, there are absurdities enough in such
great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us
that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters
appertaining to the Physical Sciences.

Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the
ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence. But
theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our
day--though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has
been proving to us lately--is, as essentially, the day of Science. I
might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here--the constitution
of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking
as the soul of antiquity). Was that scientific? Surely not.

The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was
beauty, sensuous beauty. This prevailing passion for the beautiful
exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said:
it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in
their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture. The
productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful,
and, as such, will never fade and decay, for

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that
Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity.
Athens was too imaginative and poetical. Sparta was too warlike and
barbarous. Rome was too sensual and gross. It had to wait for the
steady Teutonic mind--the plodding brains of modern England and
modern Germany. That Homer is the father of poetry--that AEschylus
is a wonder of sublimity--that Sophocles and Euripides are profound
masters of human passion and human pathos--that Aristophanes is an
exhaustless fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour--no one in
this room, or out of it, is more willing to admit than I am. But is
that to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison
and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or
Aristotle?

The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied
through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius. Every right
action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he
attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad
thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius. And this was
not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and
breathing faith with him. He believed it in his childhood, in his
youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the
deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of
Laocoon, around his giant brain. Well, gentlemen, don't let us laugh
at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a
beautiful one, and typical of many great truths. And I have often
thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than
Socrates. I mean the great man--mankind. He, too, has his good
genius and his evil genius. The former we will designate science,
the latter we will call superstition. For ages upon ages,
superstition has had the sway over him--that evil genius, who blotted
out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and
substituted all manner of blinding errors--errors which have made him
play

Such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of
creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells
us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries. In a word,
the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the
angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the
fiends.

But, at last, God has permitted man's long, long experience to be
followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient
enemy, and clasped the hands of Science--Science, that good genius
who makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the
ethereal lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns
king of the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of
Methusaleh into seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human
frame, and ranges through its most secret chambers, until at last
nothing, save the mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden;
who maps out all the nations of the earth; showing how the sable
Ethiopian, the dusky Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the
intellectual European, are but differently developed exemplars of the
same type of manhood, and warning man that he is still his 'brother's
keeper' now as in the primeval days of Cain and Abel.

The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his daedal wings up
into the starry night, there where 'God's name is writ in worlds,'
and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving
around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever
around the great central sun--'The Great White Throne of God!'

The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long
vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world
which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first,
as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious
course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid
mass, 'without form and void,' where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled
in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages,
having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had
intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life,
to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns,
compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable
dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder
of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious
forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian,
the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and
bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle
in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath
their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders,
the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and
the basest work of God--the creation of the thinking, reasoning,
sinning animal, Man.

And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing
and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand
work of developing the divinity within it. I know, indeed, that it
is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will
decline and vanish, 'like the civilizations of old.' But I venture
to deny it in toto. From a human point of view, it is utterly
impossible. And without going into the question (for I see the time
is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed
away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life
after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times
more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I
contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern
must of necessity be futile and fallacious. And for this reason,
that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science
has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of
antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political
life, and come to its own conclusions. So isolated, indeed, was one
nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of
each other's existence. A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh,
was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for
Italy alone. There was no science then to 'put a girdle round about
the earth' (as Puck says) 'in forty minutes.' But now, a new idea
brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the
whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole
habitable globe--from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru. I
am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the
ruler of the waves. The day may come that will see her sink to a
second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe. In
spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that
will see Russia the dominant power in Europe. The day may come that
will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and
learning. It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each
race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race--that the
negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian
race is now lording it over the negro. Why not? It would be only
equity. But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of
nationalities. I speak again of the great man, Mankind--the one
indivisible man that Science is making him. He will never
retrograde, because 'matter and mind comprise the universe,' and
matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind--because good
must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made? Henceforth his
road is onward--onward. Science has helped to give him such a start
that nothing shall hold him back--nothing can hold him back--save a
fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God."

But I am wandering from the subject of the 'Old House' in Crown Street and its connection with printing. The last important book that was ever printed there was a very remarkable one. It was the famous essay on Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton's friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that time a curate of the St. Ives Church--a book that was the result of an enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book, moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought. It has passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.